New Oxygen research; abundance and Cambrian (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, May 09, 2019, 11:53 (2025 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is the underlying mechanism of your comment that is at issue. I view it as much more active than your passive approach of changing environment pushing the animals to change.

dhw: This is not a passive process! It is the very opposite! Environmental change either demands or allows new actions. Survival depends on active change (= adaptation), and innovation depends on inventiveness, which is even more active. The changed environment is the trigger for action – passivity in most cases will result in extinction. According to you, however, organisms do absolutely nothing apart from magically turning on the one special programme passed down by the very first cells for every single change or, alternatively, lying/sitting there while your God performs his operations or delivers his lectures on how-to-do-it.

DAVID: Yes, this is a discussion about how speciation works. The minor adaptations we see have never been proven to do any more than that. The fossil record only shows large gaps which reinforces the problem about adaptations leading to anything. The changes we do see in any species series requires design and planning, as I view it.

I have answered your criticism that my hypothesis is passive, and so now you revert to the fact that nothing is proven. I know. Your hypothesis that your God planned every undabbled change 3.8 billion years ago and put the whole programme into the very first cells is also an unproven hypothesis. Please move on.
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DAVID: And they still have four legs despite all that time in water, It is obviously something besides environment that guides development of new forms and major modifications.

dhw: There is no need to tell us that every species is different, and of course there is “something” which develops the new forms to cope with or exploit the new environment. I propose cellular intelligence, and you propose ye ancient computer programme or dabbling. Once an organism has found a means of survival that enables it to cope with its environment, there is no need for it to change. Hence bacteria from the year dot. Some organisms remain the same (hippo), whereas others may find means of improving their chances of survival by producing new structures for themselves (whales). In your own mish-mush of hypotheses, you simply have your God organizing the same process – his programmes and dabbles result in different ways of coping with or exploiting the environment (or of course not coping, and going extinct), but you have the anatomical changes taking place before the environmental changes.

DAVID: In this arena of land animals going aquatic, those that choose to do so must solve major physiologic problems. Tell me how whales learned to give birth and nurse under water. Trial and error won't work. In view of that one point, to me your theory of speciation is impossible.

Why are you asking me to solve a mystery that not even the greatest minds on earth have yet managed to solve? Once more, nobody knows how all these changes take place. That is why you and I can only offer unproven hypotheses. (See also “Bacterial intelligence”.)